As a secondary school girl, I remember having a pact with my girlfriend never to end up with a huge, muscular man because we believed he was more likely to be physically abusive.
It sounds nonsensical now, thinking about it. I have since tossed that idea into the same mental drawer where I keep other bizarre beliefs I have heard over time: that you shouldn’t let your female friend visit your partner’s house with you; that you shouldn’t let your sister live with you, and must police what she wears if she does; and most importantly, that you shouldn’t have a housemaid.
These are beliefs I find strange, even embarrassing. Yet every once in a while, something happens that sends me rummaging back into that drawer, dusting off those old assumptions and asking, very reluctantly, “Is this really nonsense after all?”
Enter the Ada Igbo scandal.
If you’ve been anywhere near Nigerian social media in the past few days, you’ve probably been force-fed this story whether you asked for it or not. A Canada-based mother of four boys, Ada Igbo, accuses her estranged husband, Chinedu, of impregnating their housemaid while she was abroad, giving birth to their fourth child. The marriage implodes. The internet explodes. Everyone suddenly becomes a marriage counsellor, a gender studies professor, and a Supreme Court justice, often all three at once.
On the surface, it’s a familiar plot. Man cheats. The maid gets pregnant. Wife leaves. Social media picks sides like it’s a Champions League final. But beneath the noise is a deeper conversation Nigerians have been avoiding for years, even while living with it daily.
Let’s start with the uncomfortable truth: this story did not shock anyone. It offended people, yes. It angered people, absolutely. But shock? No. Because this is not new. What is new is the scale of visibility and the speed at which private family disasters now become public shareholder meetings.
Ada says the pregnancy was not the sole reason she left. She insists it was the final straw in a long line of trust breaches and emotional neglect. Critics, however, have latched onto voice notes where she admits she wasn’t particularly romantic, was busy with work, and may have withheld intimacy. In typical Nigerian fashion, many concluded that this was all the justification a married man needs to outsource affection to the nearest available female under his roof.
This is where logic packs its bags and leaves the building.
Marriage is not a performance-based contract where sex is the sole success metric and fidelity expires once deliverables are delayed. If it were, half the people screaming “she tried” and “he tried” online would be disqualified from relationships entirely. Infidelity is a choice, not an accident caused by a busy wife or a quiet bedroom.
What fascinates me most is how quickly sympathy became conditional. Ada’s supporters were told she stayed away too long. Her critics questioned her motherhood, her feminism, and her motives. Suddenly, a woman had to be perfect to qualify as betrayed. Anything less, and her husband’s actions were downgraded from “wrong” to “understandable.”
That’s a dangerous precedent.
It reinforces the idea that women must manage male behaviour preemptively, by staying attractive, staying present, staying silent, staying forgiving. Men, meanwhile, are granted the luxury of moral flexibility. When they fail, society audits the woman first.
And then there’s the “never have a housemaid” brigade, feeling vindicated. The same advice I once dumped in my nonsense drawer has been trending again, louder this time. Don’t hire help. Don’t trust anyone. Build your marriage like a bunker. It’s a tempting conclusion, but it’s also lazy. The problem isn’t housemaids. It’s entitlement. It’s secrecy. It is cheating, full stop.
The internet, predictably, turned this into entertainment. People mocked appearances, compared women, and ranked beauty as if it were relevant to betrayal. Some even argued that impregnating a maid “isn’t a deal-breaker.” That statement alone should qualify someone for compulsory silence.
What this scandal really exposes is how fragile many marriages are beneath their curated Instagram exteriors, and how ill-equipped society is to discuss fidelity without scapegoating women. It also highlights how quickly public opinion forgets the children involved, four boys whose family story is now permanently archived online for likes and engagement.
The bottom line is that infidelity is not a marital strategy. Silence is not forgiveness. Endurance is not a virtue. And blaming women for men’s choices is not culture, it’s cowardice.
So yes, now and then, I open that mental drawer again. I look at those old beliefs. I interrogate them. And then I close it firmly. Because the lesson here isn’t to fear maids or friends or sisters. It’s to demand accountability, maturity, and emotional discipline, things no drawer, locked door, or surveillance mindset can replace.
The Ada Igbo scandal will pass. Another one will replace it. They always do. The question is whether we’ll keep recycling outrage, or finally confront the systems that keep producing the same story with different names.
History says we won’t. But hope, inconveniently, insists otherwise.
